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THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

RIVERSIDE

Ex Libris '

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K. OGDEN ;

Shakespeare's
Handwriting

Oxford University Press

London Edinburgh Glasgow New York

Toronto Melbourne Bombay

Humphrey Milford M-A. Publisher to the University

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Shakespeare's
Handwriting

A Study by
Sir Edward Maunde Thompson^ G.C.B.

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At the Clarendon Press

MDCCCCXVI

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TO
MY OLD FRIENDS

A'

N invitation from the Delegates of the Clarendon
Press to contribute a chapter on Handwriting to
Shakespeare's England, a vcork. which they then
had in contemplation^ first turned my serious attention to the
subject of Shakespeare' s penmanships and led me to study the
few authentic signatures that have survived from his hand.
This study proved more productive than I had dared to hope.
The general results have been -published in the book, above
mentioned. But it was thought that so interesting a sub-
ject as Shakespeare's handwriting might with advantage be
treated in fuller detail j and with this view the present
monograph has been written — a strictly pal aeographical study ^
altogether eschewing criticism of a literary nature.

My researches in due course led to an examination of the

well-known addition^ written in an unidentified hand^ to

the MS, play of Sir Thomas More, now the Harleian MS,

7368 in the British Museum. Nearly half a century

^ has passed since^ in 1 8 7 1 , this addition was brought to

'^ public notice in a contribution to Notes and Queries by

't the Shakespearian student Richard Simpson^ who suggested

^ that it was an autograph composition of Shakespeare, This

^ attribution could not be substantiated at the time : the key

of the problem was still undiscovered. When I lately

viii SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

renewed acquaintance with the Harleian MS,^ it was with
a lively interest that I recognized in the handwriting of
the addition certain features which I had already noted in
S hakes fe are'' s signatures, A careful study of the MS,
ensued J and in this monograph I have set out my reasons
for concluding that at length we have found what so many
generations have vainly desired to behold — a holograph MS,
of our great English poet.

The memory of the early years of a long official life in
the service of the Trustees of the British Museum recalls
a twofold forecast^ hazarded in the enthusiasm of youth and
the confidence of inexperience^ that we might live to see the
day when a papyrus roll^ inscribed with one of the Epistles of
St. Paul within measurable distance of the Apostle'' s life-
time.^ might be rescued from some early Egyptian Christian'* s
tomb y and when one of Shakespeare's original MSS, m'lght
emerge from the forgotten lumber of some old Warwickshire
manor-house. The Pauline papyrus still lies.^ if at all^
under the swath'ing bandages of 'its mumm'ied owner ; but., 'in
th'is age of astounding recoveries of Greekliterature — classical
and biblical — wh'ich the exploration of the land of Egypt is
so generously yielding^ who shall dare to say that such a
treasure lies beyond our reach ? And., as for the Shake-
spearian MS,., who could have made bold., any time within
these last hundred and sixty years., to proclaim that he who

SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING ix

would set eyes upon it need only raise his hand and take it
down from its shelf in the department of Manuscripts of the
British Museum ?

I close this note with the fullest expression of my obliga-
tions to my old friend and sometime colleague Mr, Alfred
William Pollard^ whose wide knowledge of Shakespearian
bibliography and literature is so willingly imparted to those
who seek his help,

£. M. r.

September^ 19 15.

Bibliography. — On the subject of the handwriting of Shakespeare, as
represented in his surviving signatures, the following works may be
referred to : S. Johnson and G. Steevens, Sbakspeare' s Plays^ 2nd edn.
1778. In vol. i, facing p. 200, is a plate of the three signatures to the
will, engraved from drawings made by Steevens in i77(5. This appears
to be the first published facsimile of these signatures. Unfortunately they
are not correctly drawn. Steevens did not understand the construction
of the English capital -6' [see pp. 13, 14 of this monograph], and mistook
that letter in the third signature for the Roman letter, converting the
incipient curve of the English letter into the finishing stroke of the
Roman letter. He has likewise converted the initial ^S'of the surname in.
the first signature into the Roman letter, and has failed to reproduce the
signature correctly in other respects : probably at that time the signature
was already partially defaced. — E. Malone, The Plays and Poems of
William Shakspeare, i7Po, reproduces (vol. i, p. ipo) Steevens's plate of
the three signatures to the will, and also gives a facsimile {ihid.^ p. 1^2)
of the signature to the Blackfriars mortgage-deed [No. 3 in this mono-
graph]. In vol. i, pp. 26'i-3 86', is published An attempt to ascertain the
Order in which the Plays of Shakspeare were written, in the course of
which Malone introduces the suggestion of Shakespeare's early employ-"
ment as a lawyer's clerk. In his Inquiry into the authenticity of certain
miscellaneous papers and legal instruments published S^^ S.W. H. Ireland]
T>ec. 2^, 179S-, T-19^-, Malone states that the mortgage-deed of the Black-
friars property (purchased by the British Museum in 185-8) was found in
1768 among the title-deeds of Mr. Fetherstonhaugh, of Oxted, Surrey, and
was presented by him to David Garrick. The Blackfriars purchase-deed
(acquired by the Guildhall Library in 184.3) also belonged to Fetherston-
haugh, and had, when Malone wrote, been recently rediscovered : he
gives a facsimile of the signature (p. 137) and draws attention to the letter
r written at the end of the surname, 'though on the very edge of the
label '. — Sir F. Madden, Observations on an Autograph of Shakspere ana
the orthography of his na^ne, contributed to Archaeologia, 1838, xxvii.
II 3-2 J, upholds the genuineness of the so-called autograph signature of

SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING xi

Shakespeare inscribed in a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne's
Essays now in the British Museum ; and contends for the spelling of the
poet's name as ' Shakspere ', challenging the reading of a in the second
syllable of the surname in the third signature to the will. — C. W.
Wallace, New Shakespeare Discoveries, contributed to Harper s Monthly
Magazine, March, ipio, describes his discovery in the Public Record
Office of the papers concerning a suit brought in 1612 by Stephen Bellott
against his father-in-law, Christopher Montjoy, with whom Shakespeare
lodged; the deposition of Shakespeare, bearing his signature, being among
the documents. Dr. Wallace has also contributed an account of the
Montjoy suit to the Nebraska University Studies (for October, ipio),
vol. X, pp. 2.51—304, under the title Shakespeare and his London associates
as revealed in recently discovered documents. — Sir Sidney Lee, A Life of
William Shakespeare, new edition, ipiy, deals with the subject of Shake-
speare's handwriting in chapter xxii. 5-18-23. From an earlier edition
the author extracted and issued, in pamphlet form, Shakespeare's Hand-
writing, i8pp, with fecsimiles. — Shakespeare' s England ((^^x^ndsdn Press),
ipi6, has, in chapter x, pp. 2pp-3op, an analysis of Shakespeare's auto-
graph signatures.

The original play of Sir Thomas More by Anthony Munday is con-
tained in the Harleian MS. 7368 in the British Museum. It is in process
of revision, being supplemented by contributions or additions by five
different hands : one of them has been attributed to Shakespeare, and is
dealt with in this monograph. The play has been thrice separately
printed: (i) Sir Thomas More : a play now first printed. Edited by the
Rev. Alexander Dyce (for the Shakespeare Society), 184.4; (^) ^^^
Thomas More. Edited with an Introduction by A. F. Hopkinson (for
private circulation), ipo2 ; (3) The Book of Sir Thomas More. Edited
(for the Malone Society) by W. W. Greg, ipii. The play has also been
included by C. F. Tucker Brooke in his Shakespearian Apocrypha, ipo8 ;
and a collotype facsimile by J. S. Farmer has been issued in the series of
Tudor Facsimile Texts, ipio. In the Malone Society edition Dr. Greg
has contributed a careful revision of the text and an accurate description
of the several hands employed in the Harleian MS. ; without, however,
entering into palaeographical details. In regard to the attribution of one

xii SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

of the additions to Shakespeare he maintains a neutral attitude ; and with
some hesitation he suggests about lypi or ij-pg as the date of the play.
But he has recently found occasion to reconsider this date. The issue in
the Tudor Facsimile Texts of a collotype of Anthony Munday's auto-
graph play q1 John a Kent and John a Cumber, dated is 9^-, led to the
identification of the text of the play o^ Sir Thomas More as in Munday's
autograph; and a recently acquired MS. (Add. 33384) in the British
Museum, containing a copy or Munday's Heaven of the Mind, also has
some preliminary pages written by Munday's hand in 1601. In a brief
note published in The Modem Language Review, vol. viii (1913), p. 8p,
Dr. Greg has given his opinion, as the result of a comparison of the
three Munday MSS., but without offering any palaeographical criticism,
that the handwriting of More seems to be intermediate between that of
John a Kent of \S9^ and that of the Heaven of the Mind of \Goi ; and
he brings down the date of More to, say, i5'p8-i6'oo. — 'The first sugges-
tion that the addition to the play of Sir Thomas More which has been
examined in this monograph is an autograph composition of Shakespeare
came from Richard Simpson in a communication to Notes and Queries,
4th Series, vol. viii, p. i (i July, 1871), and was supported by James
Spedding in the same periodical, vol. x, p. 227 (21 Sept. 1872). The
question raised, whether the addition is in the handwriting of Shake-
speare, has received little attention ; for his authentic signatures, the sole
material available for comparison, have only recently been submitted to
palaeographical analysis, and any opinions hitherto ventured have been
merely conjectural.

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SHAKESPEARE'S SIGNATURES TO THREE
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SHAKESPEARE'S SIGNATURES TO THE THREE
SHEETS OF HIS WILL \G\G

SOMERSET HOUSE

SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

The subject of Shakespeare's handwriting has never been sub-
mitted to a thorough and systematic study ; and the reason for
this neglect is not far to seek. Down to a quite recent date
five authentic signatures of the dramatist constituted the only
recognized material on which to found an opinion or to attempt
to build up a theory as to the character of the hand that he
wrote; and of these five signatures two had been evidently
subscribed under conditions restraining the freedom of the
hand, and the remaining three were written when he was
already stricken with mortal sickness.

In these circumstances, to have attempted to solve the
problem of reconstituting, with any plausible probability, the
kind of handwriting in which Shakespeare committed his
literary creations to paper might have been justly regarded as
a presumptuous undertaking which could only prove barren in
results and a futile waste of time.

But the discovery in 1 9 1 o by Dr. C. W. Wallace, in the course
of his researches in the Public Record Office, of a sixth signature
has altered the condition of things. By means of this signature,
written with a free hand, we now know that Shakespeare was
capable of writing in fluent style ^ and we recover the key of
this leading factor of the problem.

1941 B

2 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

With this addition, then, to the imperfect material which
had been at the command of the students of former days, the
possibility of arriving at some general conclusions was greatly
improved ; and it is not without hope of some measure of
success that we now propose, albeit with diffidence, to submit
the signatures to a close examination.

The material on which we have to work is meagre, but
we start with one advantage. We can confine our survey to
a single style of calligraphy. Shakespeare was born of pro-
vincial parents, citizens of a small country town in the midlands,
and was being taught in the grammar school of his native
Stratford-upon-Avon when his father's declining fortunes led
to the boy's withdrawal, probably in 15-77, to help, it is said,
in his father's trade, at the early age of thirteen years — a
period of life when learning is slender and the handwriting
is usually still unformed. But we know the character of the
writing that Shakespeare was taught. In the course of the
sixteenth century the handwriting of the educated classes in
England was undergoing a radical change. The old native
style — a rugged and tortuous style — was gradually giving place
to the new Italian hand, founded on the reformed style of the
calligraphers of the Italian renaissance, the beauty and simplicity
of which ensured in the end its general acceptance.

At the time when Shakespeare was at school, the new hand
had made its way in England so far that the more highly
educated were masters of it as well as of the native hand : they
could write in either style. But progress is always slower in
the provinces than in the capital, and the evidence of extant

THE SIGNATURES 3

specimens of the handwriting of Shakespeare's actual con-
temporaries shows that the writing-masters of Stratford were
still teaching the old English hand, and that hand alone. It
was not until later in the century that they appear to have
adopted the Italian hand (see Shakespeare'^ s England., pp. 294-5).
The strong probability that Shakespeare never learned the
Italian style thus reinforces the fact that his surviving signatures,
written in the last years of his life, are (with a single modifica-
tion which will be afterwards explained) in the old English
script. Nor is it probable that he had much opportunity for
practising and improving his handwriting during the remaining
years of his youth before he quitted Stratford for London, if,
according to tradition, he was merely assisting in his father's
business. The story that he was for a time employed as a
country schoolmaster has only Aubrey's slender authority 5 and
another story that in early years (whether before or afi:er he
left Stratford) he served as a lawyer's clerk has been generally
rejected. As to any probability of his having engaged in
literary work, which would imply practice in handwriting as
well as in composition, we can only cite, in support of the
idea, the statement of his biographer Rowe that he wrote
a ballad on Sir Thomas Lucy in revenge for his prosecution for
deer-poaching ; though this does not exclude the possibility of
other, unrecorded, efforts. There remains, however, nothing to
show that, from the time when he left school in 15-77 to the
date of his quitting his native town about 1 f 8 5-, Shakespeare
had any special occasion for using his pen for other than
business purposes or casual correspondence. Here, for the present,

B 2

4 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

we may leave the question of his education in handwriting:
there will be occasion to return to the subject on a later page.

Shakespeare's six authentic signatures are subscribed to the
following documents : —

1. His deposition in a law-suit brought by Stephen Bellott
against his father-in-law Christopher Montjoy, a Huguenot
^ tire-maker ', of Silver-street, near Wood-street in the city of
London, with whom Shakespeare lodged about the year 1(^04;
dated nth May, 1612. (Recently discovered by Dr. C. W.
Wallace in the Public Record Office.)

2. Conveyance of a house in Blackfriars, London, purchased
by Shakespeare j loth March, 1(^13. (Now in the Guildhall
Library.)

3. Mortgage-deed of the same property j nth March, 161^.
(Now in the British Museum.)

^-6. Shakespeare's will, written on three sheets of paper,
with his signature at the foot of each one j executed 2; th March,
1616. (Now in Somerset House.)

The six signatures — one of them prefaced by the words
< By me ' — present a meagre total of fourteen words. Subscribed
within the last four years of Shakespeare's life, between the
nth of May, i5i 2, and the 25-th of March, 16 16^ they suffice
to prove that at the close of his career he still wrote the native
English hand which he had been taught at school.

The actual signatures are to be read thus : —

1. Willm Shakp

2. William Shaksper 'r

3. W"^ Shakspe

THE SIGNATURES s

4. William Shakspere

f. Willm Shakspere

6. By me William Shakspeare

The Christian name is written indifferently in a shortened
form or at full length, following the ordinary practice of all
modern times. It will, however, be noticed that in each of the
first three signatures the surname is written in a shortened form ;
while in Nos. 4-<^, subscribed to the will, it is subscribed at full
length, but, as will presently be explained, with variations of
spelling. The six signatures thus fall into two groups j and this
grouping is further emphasized by the fact that those of the first
group were written when the writer was presumably in normal
health ; those of the second group, when he was on his death-
bed. All are conscious how our handwriting varies with the
state of our bodily health j and the effect of Shakespeare's
weakened condition upon his signatures in the second group is
very painfully manifest.

When the three signatures of the first group are submitted
to examination, w^e find that their value as witnesses to the
character of Shakespeare's handwriting is materially reduced by
accidental circumstances. In the first place, from the manner
in which he has executed the two Blackfriars documents (Nos. 2
and 3) it is evident that he imagined, as a layman might
imagine, that he was obliged, in each case, to confine his signa-
ture within the bounds of the parchment label which is inserted
in the foot of the deed to carry the seal, and not to allow it to
run over on to the parchment of the deed itself. Thus, in the
conveyance of the property (No. 2) he has written his signature

6 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

in two lines (the surname below the Christian name), not finding
room on the label to write it at length in the usual way, or not
taking the trouble to accommodate his signature to the breadth
of the label. And so in two lines the signature stands : William
Shakspe, the surname ending close to the edge of the label and
having above the e a flourish indicating abbreviation. The
signature was thus in itself complete, in a form which the writer
must have been in the habit of using, for it appears thus in the
mortgage deed (No. 3) which he executed on the following day.
But now, perhaps having a passing doubt whether the shortened
name would suffice, instead of leaving the signature as he had
thus finished it, he added the letter r, altering the form to
Shaksper (the abbreviating flourish being left standing above
the now penultimate letter, instead of being in the proper
position above the final letter, and thus without significance).
That the r was an afterthought and an addition to the signature
is proved by the paler colour of the ink, as though the fluid
had partially dried on the pen before the letter was written.
At this point Shakespeare's superstition for confining his sig-
nature to the limits of the label comes into play. He had
finished the abbreviated surname so close to the edge of the
label that there was no room left for the addition of the r.
The upper part of that letter is accordingly made to cross the
junction, but ever so little, and encroaches on the parchment
of the deed ^ but then, to satisfy his scruples, Shakespeare
has managed to draw back the lower portion of the letter and
ensconce it within the sacred boundary of the label. His
hesitating action in regard to this signature may be dismissed

THE SIGNATURES 7

without farther attempt at explanation ; but the important
fact remains that he was in the habit of using an abbre-
viated form of signature even in legal documents — a fact
which is substantiated by the two subscriptions (Nos. 3 and i)
which will next be examined. But before quitting the present
one it is necessary to note that the effect of the confinement of
the names to the label has been to constrain in some degree the
flow of the hand, particularly in the surname, which here
compares unfavourably with the unrestrained freedom of No. i.

In the case of the signature to the Blackfriars mortgage
deed (No. 3), the value of its evidence for determining the
general character of Shakespeare's handwriting is still further
depreciated by the writer's adoption (one might almost accuse
him of a wilful perversity !) of an unexpected style. No doubt
having in his muid the difficulty he had had on the previous day
in keeping strictly to the label of the purchase deed, he now
made sure of not transgressing by forming each of the letters
of his surname deliberately and separately (except the a and k^
which are linked) and by modifying their shapes from the usual
cursive to a restrained and formally set character. The sur-
name is here again abbreviated and the signature appears as
W^^ Shakspe — the abbreviated form of the surname which, as
we have seen, he employed (before the addition of the r) in
No. 2. This shortened form we believe to have been Shakespeare's
more usual form of signature ; and there will be occasion to refer
to it again when the signatures to the will come under review.

The formation of the abbreviating mark above the e demands
attention. In No. 2 it is composed of two slightly concave curves

8 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

joined together. In No. 3 , in keeping with the deliberate character
of the letters of the signature, it is written more exactly, and the
twin curves assume rather the shape of an open a (for which letter,
indeed, the mark has sometimes been mistaken). When employing
this mark of abbreviation it is not probable that Shakespeare had
in his mind any idea of indicating thereby the omission of any
particular letters. It was a general sign of the omission of the
ending of his name, and nothing more.

To sum up, then, the results of the scrutiny of the two
signatures to the Blackfriars deeds (Nos. 2 and 3), they amount
to this : that there is evidence that Shakespeare was in the habit
of making use of an abbreviated signature, even in legal docu-
ments j that, while No. 2 affords a clue to the general character
of Shakespeare's handwriting, its testimony is marred by a certain
restraint imposed by its restriction to the limits of the label ;
and that No. 3 is still less satisfactory in this respect owing to
the deliberate and 2/;?cursive style of the letters.

With signature No. i we are on firmer ground, and its
evidence for the object of our present study is of first-rate
importance. Here again we find a subscription in a shortened
form, but not the same as in those attached to the Blackfriars
deeds. Written carelessly but with remarkable freedom and
facility the letters are Willm Shakp — with a long horizontal
stroke passing through the stem of the^, indicating abbreviation.
It is notable that the medial s of the surname is omitted, as
though the writer thought the letter negligible, provided he
gaye the emphatic p j unless, indeed, in his hurry he accidentally
left it out. We might almost imagine that, having dropped the

THE SIGNATURES 9

unfortunate blot of ink on the k^ in his confusion he hastened
to finish the signature without giving a thought to the necessary s.
Tho. p with the crossed stem would, according to the usual laws
of abbreviated symbols, be interpreted as equivalent to per^ and
of course Shakespeare knew the literal value of this common
symbol ; but it is quite possible that he used the stem-cross
merely as a general sign of abbreviation of the ending of his
name without intending it to represent any particular spelling,
whether per^ pere^ or peare. It is remarkable that this, the
earliest of the three signatures of our first group, should again,
like the other two, come to us in a shortened form, but in
a different form from the others. The conclusion to which one
naturally comes is that, if within a year we find Shakespeare
employing two differently abbreviated signatures, even in legal
documents (and we may even count a third form in the amended
signature, with the added r, of No. 2), there may have been
other forms adopted by him at other times. At any rate these
quick changes indicate a certain carelessness on the part of the dra-
matist in the matter of his signatures j and we might even imagine
him a man impatient of the little conventionalities of daily life.
Apart, however, from the peculiarities of this specimen
of Shakespeare's calligraphy as a signature, its value for gauging
his capacity for dexterity with his pen can hardly be placed too
high. It enables us to form a judgement on this problem from
a point of view quite different from that to which we were tied
by the condition of the five signatures known to us before
its discovery. In this signature to Shakespeare's deposition we
see a strong handwriting altogether devoid of hesitation or

/

/

lo SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

restraint, the writer wielding the pen with the unconscious ease
that betokens perfect command of the instrument and an ability
for swift formation of the letters. He is plainly in the enjoy-
ment of full bodily health. There is no indication here of
any fault with the nervous system. Still there is no reason to
put forward any claim to precise calligraphy, such as would be
looked for in the writing of a highly trained hand. The
Christian name, for instance, shows evident faults. It is dashed
otF hurriedly, even impatiently, the final huddled m rather
indicated than formed. But the surname makes up for these
shortcomings by its vigorous and sure formation of the varied
curves of the letters and their links. With this signature before
our eyes we easily recognize that Shakespeare was quite equal
to the task of committing his thoughts to paper with adequate
speed, and without feeling the mechanical labour which clogs
the progress of a feeble pen.

The forms of the several letters employed in this and the
other signatures of the first group will be more conveniently
examined after the signatures of the second group have been
described, when we shall be in a position to submit the letters
of the six subscriptions in one view to a careful analysis.

Turning now to the signatures of our second group — the
three signatures subscribed to the three sheets of Shakespeare's
will, it is obvious, at a glance, that here a different order of
conditions obtains, and that there is a marked contrast with the
signatures of the first group, and especially with the one
attached to the deposition (No. i) — the painful contrast between
the handwriting of sickness and the handwriting of health.

THE SIGNATURES n

Shakespeare's will, now preserved in Somerset House, was
prepared in draft on three sheets of paper, and was originally
dated the 2 yth January, 1616. The testator is therein stated to
be < in perfect health ', as no doubt he was at the time ; and the
execution of the will was deferred. But in the course of the
next two months he was attacked by the malady which was to
prove fatal. The traditional account of the illness is that it was
a fever following on a carouse with his friends Ben Jonson and
Michael Drayton. But, whatever the cause, the condition of
the patient became so critical that the draft will had to be used
without waiting for a fair engrossment j and, with many altera-
tions and interlineations, it was executed on the zyth March.
Although Shakespeare lived for nearly a month longer, till
the 23rd April, there can be no question that at the date of
the execution of the will he was sorely stricken : of this the
imperfections in the handwriting of the signatures afford ample
evidence.

Each of the three sheets of the will bears Shakespeare's signa-
ture in full. The first sheet is signed low down in the margin
on the left. The writing has become indistinct, but the
facsimiles made when the document was in better condition
show that the signature is William Shakspere, in two lines, the
surname below the Christian name, there not being sufficient
marginal space to allow the name to be written in the ordinary
manner : just as the signature to the Blackfriars deed (No. 2)
was written in two lines to keep within the limits of the label.

The signature to the second sheet is written at the foot of
the page — Willm Shakspere, in one line.

12 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

The signature to the third sheet is written at the end of
the will — William Shakspeare, preceded by the introductory
words, ' By me '.

It will be observed that the three signatures vary in form
— the Christian name in the second (No. y) being shortened,
while it is written in full in the other two. They vary also in
spelling, the surname in the first and second (Nos. 4 and f) being
written < Shakspere ', while in the third (No. 6) it appears as
< Shakspeare ', with a in the last syllable. But besides these
inconsistencies, they vary also in handwriting and legibility.
If the three signatures had been attached to three separate
documents, they might very excusably have been mistaken at
first sight for the signatures of three different persons. Any
idea that the variations between them might be accounted for
on the supposition that they were inscribed at different times
and not all together may be dismissed without hesitation.
Shakespeare would have been required to execute his will in
proper legal form, and he must have written the three signatures
all at the time of execution. But there remains something to
be said as to the order in which he signed the three sheets, for
in themselves there is to be found intrinsic evidence on the
point.

We think that it may be safely assumed that the signature
to the third sheet was the one which was written first. It is the
signature executing the will itself — the other two signatures
being merely subscriptions authenticating the two sheets to
which they are respectively attached. As the main signature,
No. 6 is emphasized by the introductory words, < By me '. The

THE SIGNATURES 13

firmness and legibility of the first three words, ' By me William ',
as compared with the weakness and malformation of the surname
and of both the other two signatures, are very striking. We
can attribute that weakness and malformation certainly to the
condition of the dying man. The firmness of the first three
words indicate, we believe, an effort on the part of the invalid,
which however he was incapable of maintaining to the end.
Bracing himself to his task, Shakespeare, all things considered,
accomplished the three words remarkably well. There are, it
is true, minor irregularities in some of the letters which, but for
his weak state, would scarcely have appeared. On the other
hand, the success with which he has formed the B with its rather
intricate strokes, and the firmness of the fine upstroke to the m
in < me ' and to the W of the Christian name, the latter even
furnished with a delicate initial loop (like the eye of a needle),
are in astonishing contrast to the breakdown which ensues in
the surname.

We will proceed to examine carefully this written surname
and compare it in detail with the signatures of the first group.
Turning to the signature to the deposition (No. i) we see there
in its best form the old English capital S and we have no
difficulty in understanding its construction. The two alternating
curves which constitute the actual letter are finished off by
continuing the tail of the second curve and drawing it round
the letter in an embracing semicircle which ends in an arch
above the head. Now to analyse the iS" in the will-signature
before us (No. 6). The two alternating curves are distinctly
written (the first curve, represented by a small hook, appearing

14 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

in the centre of the letter), but when the hand begins the
retrograde movement from right to left in order to accomplish
the embracing semicircle, it fails at once. The curve, instead of
travelling its proper course, immediately becomes angular, and
being carried upwards by the wavering hand in a vertical line
becomes entangled in the back of the initial curve of the S,
and then, rising higher, it at length finishes in the covering
arch with better success, the hand now moving in easier action
from left to right. The tag at the end is evidently an accidental
flick from the feeble hand. The curious result of this failure
to write the old English letter in correct form is that a letter
has been produced which may be easily mistaken (as it has been
mistaken), by those who are not acquainted with the construction
of the old English letter, for a capital S of the Italian (or, as we
now call it, the Roman) alphabet.

In the deposition signature (No. i) the letters ha are
linked by a bold action of the pen, the pendent bow of the
b being carried up above the line in an arched curve and
merging with the a, which by this action is left open at the top
like a u. It will be seen that Shakespeare has used the same
style of linking in the Blackfriars signature (No. 2), where
however the ink has partially failed in the extension upwards of
the pendent bow of the h. In the will-signature (No. 6) the
letters ha are weakly formed, and they are not linked ; but it
will be noticed that the pendent bow of the h is produced
upwards to a point level with the top of the line of writing
and then breaks off abruptly, as though the writer had not had
the power to accomplish the arched curve and to link it to

THE SIGNATURES ly

the a. The next following letter is so imperfect that, taken
independently, it would scarcely be recognized as a k. It
runs on to the following long j-, which is weakly written
and ends in a tremulous finial. Then follow the letters pe
linked : and here we arrive at a very interesting point in our
scrutiny.

Shakespeare appears usually to have written the old English
e with the loop reversed. He has formed it in its normal
shape in signature No. 2, the loop there being perfect. In the
signature before us and in the other two signatures to the will,
this letter is in all instances imperfectly formed, the loop being
slurred and the letter ending in a mere thickening or tick — in
fact the letter is a blind letter. But in the case of the e follow-
ing the p in the surname of the signature No. <J, it will be seen
that there is something more than the tick or blind loop of the
other instances — a long waving horizontal flourish proceeds
from the top of the letter. This flourish on close scrutiny will
be found to consist of two shallow curves, conjoined and ending
in a thickening or dot. Now, having in mind Shakespeare's
practice of signing his surname in a shortened form, as demon-
strated in the signatures of the first group, we feel pretty
confident that in this signature (written so far) we have another
instance of the abbreviated surname, the twin-curved flourish
being in the principle of its construction similar to the abbrevia-
ting flourish in signatures Nos. 2 and 3. Thus we have here
the surname written 'Shakspe' with an abbreviating flourish
just as we have seen it written in No. 3, and in No. 2 (before the
r was added), that is, in the shortened form which we have

i6 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

reason to believe was one adopted by Shakespeare in the execu-
tion of legal deeds.

In this instance, however, the surname has not been allowed
to remain in a shortened form. For some sufficient reason —
perhaps the lawyer required the signature to be in full ; perhaps
the testator himself, on second thoughts, may have decided that
in the execution of so solemn a document as his last will there
should be no ambiguity about the subscription — the dying man
added the concluding letters of the name, are, writing the a
small and bringing it quite under the flourish in order to follow
close to the preceding e. The letters are weakly formed, the
final e being a blotted or blind letter ; but we have in this
instance the name in its full form, ' Shakspeare ', with a in the
last syllable. The existence of the a has indeed been disputed
by Edmund Malone [Inquiry^ i7 9<J, p. 117), who only sees in the
letter a random blot due to the tremor of the hand 5 and this
view is supported by Sir F. Madden [Observations^ 1838). But
we venture to maintain that the letter is really the letter a and
not a mere blot. It is extremely improbable that a random
blot should have taken the shape of the letter which might
naturally be expected to occur in that place ; and the fact that
it is linked with the following r by a very decided connecting
stroke proves that the writer intended it for a letter. There
would have been no need to link a blot. If we refer to No. 5-,
we find there an instance of the letter r devoid of a connecting
stroke when unlinked with the preceding letter.

The other two signatures to the will (Nos. 4 and j) need not
detain us long. They are both very imperfectly written. No. y

THE SIGNATURES 17

being the worst of all and the one which we believe was the last
to be subscribed. In our view, the sick man, when he had
succeeded in accomplishing the main signature, relaxed all effort,
and, knowing that the two signatures still to be written were
only authenticating signatures, he scrawled them he cared not
how. The fact that they both have the surname in full,
< Shakspere ', affords evidence that they were written after No. d,
in which the surname, as we have endeavoured to demonstrate,
was extended from a shortened to a full-length form. Had not
that surname been so extended, it may be assumed that Shake-
speare would have been content to use, according to his habit,
shortened signatures also to authenticate the first two sheets of
his will. That the two signatures should not be consistent in
spelling with that of No. 6 — both omitting the a in the last
syllable of the surname — was perhaps hardly to be expected.
It is a fact that people in Shakespeare's days were not
always consistent in the spelling of their own names ; but it
is curious that two differently spelt subscriptions should have
been attached to one and the same document. The lapse
may be fairly ascribed to the testator's bodily condition ; or
it may even be taken as evidence that he was so accustomed
to sign his surname in a shortened form, that, when he had to
expand it, he was indifferent to the manner of spelling the
ending.

The surname in the signature to the second sheet (No. y) has
also been read * Shakspeare ' with a in the final syllable j but
this is an error caused by entanglement of the name with the
pendent bow of /; in the word <■ the ' in the last line of the text

I9<I C

1 8 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

of the will beneath which the signature is written. The signa-
ture proceeds as far as ' Shakspe ' j then, coming to the bow, the
pen is lifted to jump the obstacle, and in consequence the
concluding letters re are separated by the base of the bow
(mistaken for an a) from the rest of the name.

It should also be noticed that, taught by his failure with
the capital iS" in No. 6^ Shakespeare has here avoided a struggle
with the embracing semicircle by forming it in two sections,
with a gap between them, instead of attempting to execute it in
a continuous curve.

Before bringing to a close this section of our study, in
which the general character of the signatures and the conditions
under which they were written have been explained, and before
passing to the scrutiny of the several alphabetical letters em-
ployed by Shakespeare in those authentic specimens of his
handwriting- there is one important detail in their construc-
tion which must now be described.

When it was stated above that he wrote his signatures in
the old English script, a note of warning was added that this
was subject to a certain modification. This modification of
Shakespeare's English hand consists in his use of a long s (/),
as a medial letter in the surname of his signatures, in the form
of the Italian cursive letter, which was no doubt borrowed
by him from the new foreign style which was making its way
in England with increased vigour during the poet's later years.
It figures in the signatures Nos. 2, 3, and 6. It would be
useless to seek for a definite reason for his arbitrary selection
of this letter to be associated with the purely English letters

THE SIGNATURES 19

of his signature j but it may perhaps be suggested that in
practice he found the English long s (f), with its aggressively-
large bow topping the line of writing, an awkward letter to
stand next to the k, likewise a tall looped letter, and that
he therefore generally adopted the simpler and more easily
written Italian form. (The letter in the badly written sig-
nature No. y appears to be an exception and to be intended
for the English long s. It will be examined below.) As was
only to be expected, to a certain extent the intermingling of
the letters (and particularly the capital letters) of the two styles,
the native English and the intruding Italian, is to be found
in the handwritings of the time ' j but the adoption of a single
letter, in the way that Shakespeare has adopted this Italian
form, is at least remarkable; its employment constitutes a
personal peculiarity and provides us with one of the keys for
the identification of the poet's handwriting.

Proceeding now to examine the construction of the indi-
vidual letters found in Shakespeare's signatures, we shall follow
them in the two groups already defined. In the letters of the
first group, written when he was in normal health, we shall
expect to find the letters formed with normal regularity and

' An interesting and appropriate illustration of this crossing of the two alphabets is
seen in plate X of The Catalogue of the Shakespeare Exhibition held in the Bodleian Library^
19K?, in which are reproduced cuttings from the shelf-lists of books arranged under
letter S in the Bodleian Library, which were drawn up by different hands between i5i4
and Kjij. The entries of 'Shakespeare' (1623) are written, in four of the lists, in the
English script ; in three, in the Italian. But the English script is not unalloyed, for both
the initial 5 and the mediaiyare in the Italian style. Nor, on the other hand, is the
integrity of the Italian script respected, in which other entries are written, for here an
English letter occasionally intrudes.

C 2

20 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

firmness : in those of the second group we shall have to make
full allowance for malformation and indecision owing to the
weak condition of the dying man.

In the six signatures there are represented eleven small
letters of the alphabet : a^ f , h^ /', k^ /, w, p^ r^ s^ y\ and three
capital letters : ^, S^ W.

a. — In the first group we find the ordinary closed letter in
No. 3. But it is not to be forgotten that this signature
is written deliberately in formal characters. In the other
two signatures, written cursively, the same ordinary letter
appears in the Christian name of No. 2 ; but in the sur-
name of both Nos. I and 2 the open a-shaped letter is used
because it is linked with the preceding /; in the way
described above (p. 14): it is formed more freely in No. i
than in the constrained signature No. 2. In No. i a pro-
minent feature in the letter is the spur at the back, which
is so marked that it may be regarded as a personal pecu-
liarity. In the more constrained writing of No. 2 the spur
does not appear, the base of the letter being round. (It
may be here noted that one form of the open letter ^,
which is in common use in the English hand of this period,
is provided with an introductory curve above the line —
a form which no doubt grew out of the frequent linking
of this letter by means of the arched link, as seen here in
No. I, the link eventually becoming an integral part of
the letter. And it is not only the letter h which is thus
linked with a^ although that combination appears to have

THE LETTERS OF THE SIGNATURES 21

been the most common ; ma^ na^ sa^ ya, &c., connected by
the arched link, also occur.) In the second group, through
the inability of the sick man to control the pen, the arched
link does not find a place : the ordinary form of a alone
is used.

e. — The ordinary cursive e of the time has the loop reversed.
In the first group, it is normal only in No. 2. In the second
group it degenerates into a blind letter j or a tick takes the
place of the loop. The letter in No. 3 is of the more set
type, composed of two independent curves, not looped.

k. — This letter was one of the letters of the English alphabet
which called for special dexterity in the writer. The loop
at the head, the bend in the main-stroke, the turn to the
left, and the sweeping bow dropping below the line and
thence rising, as required, to link, either above or below
the line of writing, with the next following letter — all re-
quired so many quick movements of the pen and of the
controlling fingers. In the first group it is formed with
great freedom in No. i ; less so in No. 2. (The letter in
No. 3 is of a more formal type.) In the second group the
malformation of the head-loop in No. 5- and its evasion
in No. 6, and in both instances the angularity of the turns
in the letter and the lack of freedom in the pendent bow,
indicate the difficult points where a weak hand would
naturally fail. As the freedom of the letter in No. i sug-
gests, Shakespeare, when writing under ordinary conditions,
no doubt would have accomplished all the turns of the
letter with ease; under pressure of haste he might have

22 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

slurred the bends and curves into less pliant strokes ; but
he would not have passed from curves into the angular efforts
of his dying hand.

i, — There is little to be said about this rather insignificant
letter. There is a tendency to make the base pointed —
a tendency which is exaggerated in the badly written
signatures Nos. 4 and 5".

k, — Shakespeare seems to have indulged in variety in his treat-
ment of this letter in his signatures. Perhaps the fact of
its being a rather difficult letter to write with ease, and
also that he had to write it every time he wrote his name,
may have led him into experimenting in different forms.
The normal shape of the letter in the English cursive
alphabet of the time was that seen in No. 3 : a looped stem
with a short horizontal base-stroke, and a loop and cross-
bar attached to the centre of the stem. Unfortunately in
No. I the letter is hopelessly obliterated by the untidy blot.
In No. 2 it is of the normal shape but not very clearly
written, the central loop being diminutive. The second
group provides us with two other forms. In No. 5- the
construction of the letter, although clumsily written,
can be followed : the stem is rounded at the base like
a modern cursive /, and the pen is carried upwards to the
level of the middle of the stem, and then, without being
lifted, forms the cross-bar by moving horizontally to
the left and then travelling back on the same line to
the right, a heavy dot or comma being afterwards added
above the cross-bar to represent the central loop of the

THE LETTERS OF THE SIGNATURES 23

normal letter. The skeleton of the letter may be repre-
sented thus : ^. This formation of the letter k is so
unusual that we are justified in marking it as most probably
a personal peculiarity in Shakespeare's writing and as thus
affording a means of identifying his hand. In the k of
No. 6 the /-shaped construction is seen in progress but omits
the cross-bar, and the imperfect letter runs on and links up
the following long /. Here then we find an instance o£ 3. k
without a cross-bar.

/. — Generally carelessly written, without symmetry.

m. — As a final letter m is huddled and incomplete in No. i ;
it is an insignificant letter in No. 2, running off small, the
minims concave, and ending in a turn-over flourish. In
No. 3, written small above the line, the letter ends in a super-
fluous pendent tag, as if the hand had wavered. In the
second group, more deliberately written, it appears in com-
plete form with its three minims. In no instance is it well
formed, the proper convexity of the minims being neglected.

p, — The normal form of the English letter appears in No. 2.
In No. 3 it is the truncated ^, which was used less fre-
quently. In the second group, we have malformed speci-
mens : a twisted letter in No. f ; a blind letter in No. 6.
The letter in No. i with stroke through the stem, which
is the recognized symbol for the contracted syllable per^
is formed hastily : a mere loop for the body of the letter,
and an oblique stem — a reclining letter.

r. — This letter occurs four times, in Nos. 2, 4, 5-, and (5, and
only in the left-shouldered shape, ^.

24 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

s, — The adoption by Shakespeare of the Italian cursive long
s (f) as a medial letter in his surname has already been
referred to above (p. i 8). In the first group, it is omitted in
No. I ; in No. 2 it is a thin letter, formed with a finer
line than the rest of the letters, evidently by a light stroke
of the pen turned inwards, and ending in a dot; in No. 3
it is written in the same way but more deliberately, in
conformity with the exact style of the signature. The
same construction of the letter is seen in No. 5, of the
second group ; but there it is linked with the preceding
k hj 2i blind head-loop and ends in a tremulous finial. In
No. 5" the letter is different, and is no doubt intended for
the English long j- (f), although obscurely written. The
letter, when normally written, begins in the centre with
a vertical down-stroke to form the shaft ; then the pen
is carried up on the same line and continued in a bold
sweep to form the head. In No. 5- the shaft is looped, and
the head appears to be patched up into the semblance of
a bow. In this signature, perhaps the last that Shakespeare
ever wrote, it seems as if he reverted, through forgetfulness,
to an earlier style before he had adopted the Italian form of
letter.

y, — This letter occurs but once, in the word < By ' in No. 6.
It is of the normal English cursive type.

B. — Of the three capital letters found in the signatures, it is
remarkable that, although so afflicted with bodily infirmity
that he failed to accomplish the whole of his signature
in No. 6 without a breakdown, Shakespeare has succeeded

THE LETTERS OF THE SIGNATURES 25-

in forming the rather elaborate English letter B^ with its
large flying fore-limb, so successfully.

S. — The construction of the English capital S has already been
described above (p. 1 3). In the first group, in No, i it
appears in its best form : the actual letter, so to say, in
the heart of the symbol, embraced by a semicircular curve
which is in fact a fanciful extension of its tail. In the
two constrained signatures, Nos. 2 and 5, the two examples
of the letter are complete, but the sweeping curve is
embarrassed and has lost its free character. The quavering
end of this curve in No. 3 seems to be evidence of Shake-
speare's inability to write neatly in a confined space. The
malformation of the letter in the signatures Nos. 6 and s
of the second group has already been accounted for
(pp. 13, 18).

W. — Shakespeare made use of two forms of the capital W in
his signatures: the one, which resembles our modern cursive
letter, is seen in Nos. i, 3, and 6^ the other, which is the
more elaborate letter of his time, has the final limb attached
to the middle stroke by a b^se-curve, like the modern
German cursive letter, and is used in Nos. 2, 4, and 5-.
In most instances an ornamental dot is placed within the
curve of the final limb. This ornament is a common
feature also in other capital letters of the English alpha-
bet, particularly in the scrivener's hand.

We here bring to a close the description of the general
character of Shakespeare's authentic signatures and of the forma-

2<J SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

tion of the several alphabetical letters of which he made use.
We may now venture to express an opinion, formed by the
study of these signatures, on the general style of his hand-
writing and his ability to cope with the clerical labours of
authorship. To begin with, it has been shown that Shake-
speare wrote the native English hand which he had originally
been taught at school. That style of writing was in many
respects rude and ill-formed, including as it did among its
letters extravagant and exaggerated shapes ill adapted to re-
ceive the calligraphic treatment which could be applied with
effect to the simple and chastened style of the imported Italian
cursive hand. Besides, Shakespeare had received only an im-
perfect education and would have had little, if any, opportunity
of cultivating the graces of handwriting which a more con-
tinuous training might have developed. If the handwriting
of a scholar or man of affairs, who had had the advantage
of the education of those in the higher ranks of life up to
the period of early manhood, had been the subject of our
inquiry, we should have looked for a script of individual
character, displaying a pliant play of the pen and exhibiting
those little tricks and turns which constitute the features of
a man's handwriting and are as easily recognizable in the eyes
of his acquaintance as are the features of his face.

With Shakespeare's handwriting the case is different. From
the time when he left school, still in boyhood, to the time
when he quitted Stratford in early manhood, as we have
already noticed, he probably had but little occasion for exer-
cising his pen. His writing therefore when he entered life

THE SIGNATURES 27

in London was probably of the schoolboy type, which had
casually and mechanically strengthened with his growth but was
deficient in the individual quality which we call character.
This is what we might expect ; and the examination of his
signatures supports this view. The writing here is of the
common English type, with little to distinguish it from that
of any number of ordinary hands of the same type written
by Englishmen engaged in trade or commerce or other afEiirs
of life.

In addition to the ordinary character of Shakespeare's hand-
writing, the inequality of the several signatures among them-
selves is also a source of perplexity in the attempt to gauge
its standard. Taking into our hands the signature to the
deposition (No. i), there can be no question of the dramatist's
ability to write a fluent hand. But when we place by its
side and compare with it the signature of the Blackfriars
conveyance (No, 2), we are struck with the difference in style,
and we recognize that under embarrassing circumstances he
failed to write easily. If the later signature alone had sur-
vived, we should have been inclined to judge Shakespeare's
handwriting to have been that of an imperfectly educated
man of inferior rank. The writing has lost in standard of
character, the letters have lost form. Perhaps we may best
"express our estimate of the quality of this specimen if we
declare it to be comparatively mean j and we may even see
in it a deterioration, a reversion to a lower level than that
to which the writer of No. i by constant practice had been
able to attain. This lower level of writing, resulting from

28 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

the writer's embarrassment when confining his signature arbi-
trarily to restricted limits, indicates, we think, a certain lack
of confidence in himself which may have been induced by
a subconsciousness of imperfect training. There is likewise
an indication of carelessness, if not of slovenliness, in both
these signatures, to be detected in the presence of the dis-
figuring blots effacing the k in No. i and marring the W in
No. 2. Practically these two signatures are the only specimens
from among the six which afford sufficient data for forming
an opinion on the character of Shakespeare's handwriting.
The third signature, as already noticed, is too formal to serve
as a criterion. But here again there is an indication of dete-
rioration under embarrassment ; although the writer was form-
ing his letters slowly and deliberately. The three signatures
to the will are likewise of little value for general comparison,
with the exception of the first three words of No. 6^ which
have an importance not only on account of the comparative
firmness with which they are inscribed, but also from the
presence of the delicate introductory upstrokes in connexion
with the second and third. Such upstrokes, which may be classed
as ornamental accessories, are to be found among the English
handwritings of the period, but not in frequent instances ;
a certain percentage of writings thus ornamented may be picked
out, here and there, in turning over a series of contemporary
documents j and these will be found generally to be the work
of the more expert calligraphers or professional scriveners.
The presence of the two examples in this signature, which is
introduced with formality by the words < By me ', seems to

THE SIGNATURES 29

suggest that the writer was preparing to execute his will in
the best formal style of his calligraphy. But, however that
may be, the important points regarding these two upstrokes
are their length, the precise manner of their formation, and
the contrast of their fineness with the comparative heaviness
of the downstrokes of the letters of the words with which they
are connected. We should certainly be prepared to find such
introductory upstrokes in any MSS. emanating from Shake-
speare's hand.

Shakespeare's handwriting, then, being of an ordinary type
and presenting £qw salient features for instantaneous recognition,
we should have to test very closely any writings which might be
put forward as in his autograph, in order to detect in them any
personal peculiarities, which, however small and even seemingly
trivial when considered individually, might, when taken col-
lectively, afford cumulative evidence for identification. Such
peculiarities would be, among others, the delicate introductory
upstrokes just described, the employment of the Italian long
J" (/), the unusual form of the k noted above, and other personal
varieties among the letters.

The examination of the authentic signatures of Shakespeare
having been completed, the next step in our undertaking is to
submit to a like scrutiny a MS. fragment which has for many
years been well known among Shakespearian students as possibly
an autograph composition of the dramatist.

This fragment is a portion of the play ofSir Thomas More, the
bulk of which has been identified as the work of the Elizabethan

30 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

playwright Anthony Munday, and is contained in the Harleian
MS. 73(^8 in the British Museum. The play is here in course
of revision. Of the twenty paper leaves of which it is now
composed, thirteen are in the autograph of the author. The
rest (seven leaves, together with two small sheets originally pasted
down to two pages of the original MS., but now lifted from
them) are contributions by five different hands, and contain
additional matter intended to take the place of, or supplement,
passages which have been excised or marked for deletion in the
author's MS. Two of these leaves, now numbered 8 and 9,
contain, in three pages (the verso of f. 9 being left blank), an
addition which has been adjudged by critics, on account of the
high merit of its composition, to be worthy of being pronounced
the work of Shakespeare, and to be in his autograph. It is not
necessary in this place to enter into the subject of the play
further than to state that this addition was written for insertion
in a scene representing the insurrection of the London appren-
tices against the aliens resident in the city, which was quelled by
the intervention of More, then sheriff. Nor are we called upon
to give any opinion on the literary value of the addition j per-
haps enough has already been written on that head by qualified
scholars. Our study is strictly palaeographical ; and what we
have to ascertain is whether the handwriting can be shown to
possess characteristics which are sufficient to identify it with the
writing of the undoubted signatures of Shakespeare.

The Harleian MS., the leaves of which measure about 1 2^ by
8 1 inches, is, as regards most of its pages, in poor condition, and
has been extensively repaired about the middle of the last

THE HARLEIAN ADDITION 31

century ; many of its pages having been then protected with
tracing paper pasted to the surface. The result has been unfor-
tunate, as, chiefly owing to the thickening of the paste, the writing
is much obscured. This is unhappily the case with the recto
page of f. 8, which is still covered with tracing paper ; and the
verso page, from which it has been possible to remove the tracing
paper without injury to the MS., has also suffered in former days
from the effects of damp. But the third page, f. 9 «, is perfect,
and the writing is in excellent condition.

The play of Sir Thomas More was first edited from the Har-
leian MS. by Alexander Dyce, for the Shakespeare Society, in
1844. The chief value of his edition consists in the fact that
he used the MS. before it had been repaired, and that therefore
it is the authority for those portions of the text which have since
become illegible. Other editions have been issued by Mr. A. F.
Hopkinson (privately printed) in 1902, and by Mr. C. F. T. Brooke,
in his Shakespeare Apocrypha, in 1908. But the latest edition, by
Dr. W. W. Greg, printed for the Malone Society in 191 1, holds
the field. With infinite pains the editor has scrupulously revised
the text and has determined and criticized, most successfully, the
several handwritings found in the MS. The entire MS. has been
reproduced in collotype in the Tudor Facsimile Texts by Mr. J. S.
Farmer in 1910.

The three pages of the addition attributed to Shakespeare
are now submitted herewith in collotype facsimile together with
a transcript of the text.

The characters represented are the insurgents, including
Lincoln (a broker, the ringleader), George Betts and his brother

3 2 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

a clown, and Williamson (a carpenter) and his wife Doll j a ser-
geant-at-arms and a sherifFj and the Lord Mayor, the Earl of
Surrey, the Earl of Shrewsbury^ and Sir Thomas More.

Lincolne Peace heare me, he that will not see (a red) hearing at a harry Fql. 8*
grote, butter at a levenpence a pou(nde, meale at) nyne shilling^ a
Bushell and Beeffat fower nob(les a stone lys)t to me
[other] Geo hett yt will Come to that passe yf strain (gers be su)fFerd mark hiin
Linco our Countrie is a great eating Country, argo they eate more in 5

our Count rey then they do in their owne
[other] hetts clow by a halt penny Joff a day troy waight

Line they bring in straing rootes, which is meerly to the viidoing of poor

prentizes, for what^ [a watrie] a sorry psnyp to a good hart
[oth] 'William "trash trash, : they breed sore eyes and tis enough to infect the lo

Cytty w' the palsey
Lin nay yt has infected yt w* the palsey, for theise basteid^ of dung

as you knowe they growe in Dvng haue infected vs, and yt is our
infeccion will make the Cytty shake which ptly Corns through
the eating oFpsnyps 15

[o] Clown, betta trewe and pumpions togeather

Enter seriant what say yo" to the mercy of the king do yo" refuse yt
Lin yo*^ woold have <vs) vppon thipp woold yo" no marry do we not, we

accept of the kingf mercy but wee will showe no mercy vppo
the straingers 20

seriaunt yo" ar the simplest thingt that eu' stood in such a question

now prenty

Lin how say yo" picntisscs symple downe w'*' him

all prentisses symple prentisses symple

[Words or letters now illegible are here enclosed within pointed brackets ; deletions,
within square brackets. Alterations by a second hand, identified as C by Dr. Greg, are printed
in italics. Abbreviations and contractions used in the text are: — p=^«>-j p=^?-o; eu*=:
e-vir (1. zi) ; uppo=:M^o« ; matie = wawne j and a looped flourish = final es (sometimes j).]

5 Linco] in, two minims only. 10 William] w, two minims only. 12 dung] un

written with five minims. 23 The small cross at the end of the line (found also elsewhere)

is probably a mark by some modern reader or copyist.

THE HARLEIAN ADDITION

Enter the L maier Surrey

Shrewsbury
[Sher] Maior hold in the king^ name hold
Surrey frend^ masters Countrymen

mayer peace how peace I [sh] Charg yo" keep the peace

Shro. my masters Countrymen

[Sher] ff77//<7wj-<?« The noble Earle of Shrowsbury Ictt^ hear him

33

as

30

Ge bettt
Line
bettt

all
Line

Surr
all

moor

Line
Doll

all

moor

all

all

weele heare the EarJe of Surrey

the earle of Shrowsbury

weele heare both

both both both both

Peace 1 say peace ar yo" men of Wisdome [ar] or

what ar yo"

[But] what yo" will haue them but not men of wisdome

weele not heare my L of Surrey, [a^'J no no no no no

— shrowsbury «hr

whiles they ar ore the banck of their obedyenc

thus will they bere downe all thing^

Shreiffmoor speakes shall we heare shreef moor speake

Lett^ heare him a keepes a plentyfuU shievaltry. and a made my

Brother Arther watchin(s) Seriant Safes yeoman let^ heare

shreeve moore

Shreiue moor moor more Shreue moore

(ev>en by the riile yo" haue among yo*^^ sealues

Comand still audience

<S)urrey Sury

moor moor

35

40

45
FOL. V>

Lincolne bettf. peace peace scilens peace
moor

50

Yo" that haue voyce and Credyt w* the [mv] nvmber

Comaund them to a stilnes
Lincolne a plaigue on them they will not hold their peace the deule

Cannot rule them
moor Then what a rough and ryotous charge haue yo"

to Leade those that the deule Cannot rule

good masters heare me speake

55

it^i

D

34

Doll

all
moor

[D] Bett

moor

Doll

SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

I byth mas will we moor thart a good howskeeper and I

thanck thy good worship for my Brother Arthur watchins

peace peace

look what yo" do offend yo" Cry vppo

that is the peace; not (on) of yo" heare present

had there such fellowes lyvd when yo" wer babes

that coold haue topt the peace, as nowe yo" woold

the peace wherin yo" haue till nowe growne vp

had bin tane from yo", and the bloody tymes

coold not haue brought yo»^ to [theise] the state of men

alas poor things what is yt yo" haue gott

although we graunt yo" geat the thina; yo" seeke

marry the removing of the straingers w*'^ cannot choose but

much [helpe] advauntage the poor handycraftes of the Cytty

graunt them remoued and graunt that this yo"^ [y] noyce

hath Chidd downe all the matie of Ingland

ymagin that yo" see the wretched straingers

their babyes at their backf , and their poor lugage

plodding tooth port^ and cost^ for transportacion

and that yo" sytt as king^ in your desyres

aucthoryty quyte sylenct by yo"^ braule

and yo" in ruff of yo' [yo] opynions clothd

what had yo" gott ; lie tell yo", yo" had taught

how insolenc and strong hand shoold prevayle

how orderd shoold be quelld, and by this patterne

not on of yo" shoold lyve an aged man

for other ruffians as their fancies wrought

w'*^ sealf same hand sealf reasons and sealf right

woold shark on yo" and men lyke ravenous fishes

wooM feed on on another

before god that^ as trewe as the gospell

60

65

70

75

80

85

5:8 /]=^e. 6% on'\ = onej as in 11. 83, 87, 91.

termination es is probably intended, but the e is malformed.
7 3 matie'\ the mark of contraction omitted.

71 handycraftes'^ the
72 wojyce] y altered from w.

THE HARLEIAN ADDITION

35-

lO

[Bett^l Uyicoln nay this a sound fellowe I tell yo" lets mark him
moor Let me sett vp before yo"' thoughts good treind^ 90

on supposytion, which if yo" will marke

yo" shall pceaue howe horrible a shape

yo' ynnovation beres, first tis a sinn

which oft thappostle did forwarne vs of urging obeiienc to aucthory(ty)

and twere [in] no error yf I told you all yo" wer in armes gainst g(od) 95
all marry god forbid that Fol. ^*

moo nay certainly yo" ar

for to the king god hath his offyc lent

of dread of lustyce, power and Comaund

hath bid him rule, and willd yo" to obay 100

and to add ampler matie to this
he [god] hath not [le] souly lent the king his figure

his throne [hys] &: sword, but gyven him his owne name

calls him a god on earth, what do yo" then

rysing gainst him that god himsealf enstalls

but ryse gainst god, what do yo" to yo' sowles

in doing this o desperat [ar] as you are.

wash your foule mynds w' teares and those same hand^

that yo" lyke rebells lyft against the peace

lift vp for peace, and your vnreuerent knees

[that] make them your feet to kneele to be forgyven

[is safer warrs, then euer yo" can make]

[in in to yo*^ obedienc] s
[whose discipline is ryot ; why euen yo"^ [warre] hurly]

tell me but this

[cannot f)ceed but by obedienc] what rebell captaine

loi <tw<i] n written with three minims. loz souly\=. ioUly . First written ow/y 5 then

a long s squeezed in under the line before the 0 ; and, the writer's n and u being much alike,
the word is converted into souly. 103 hys\ something is written above this deleted word j

probably a symbol for and. i 10 and your\ a word was interlined for insertion between

these two words, but it appears to have been wiped out while the ink was still wet. The
traces of the letters seem to suggest bend. 1 12-14 is safer . . . obedienc\ these two and

a half lines were left in an unfinished state by the writer. In 1. 113 he altered warre into
-narrs by interlining a long j, having used warrs in 1. 112; then he struck out the word and
substituted hurly. Then he appears to have interlined the words m in to yo^ obedienc as an

D 2

3d SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

as mutynes ar incident, by his name 115

can still the rout who will obay [th] a traytor

or howe can well that |)clamation sounde

when ther is no adicion but a rebel!

to quallyfy a rebell, youle put downe straingers

kill them cutt their throts possesse their howses 1 30

and leade the matie of lawe in liom

[alas alas]

to slipp him lykc a hound ; [saying] say nowe the king

as he is clement, yf thoffendor moorne

shoold so much com to short of yoar great trespas

as but to banysh yo", whether woold yo" go. 135

what Country by the nature of yo^ error

shoold gyve you harber go yo" to fFraunc or flanders

to any larman ^vince, [to] spane or portigall

nay any where [why yo"] that not adheres to Ingland

why yo" must need^ be straingers, woold yo" be pleasd 130

to find a nation of such barbarous temper

that breaking out in hiddious violence

woold not afoord yo", an abode on earth

whett their detested knyves against yo"^ throtes

spurne yo" lyke dogg'C, and lyke as yf that god 135

owed not nor made not yo", nor that the elament^,

wer not all appropriat to [ther] yo"^ Comfort^.

but Charterd vnto them, what woold yo" thinck

to be thus vsd, this is the straingers case

and this your mountanish inbumanyty. 140

all fayth a sales trewe letts vs do as we may be doon by

[all] Linco weele be ruld by yo" master moor yf youle stand our
freind to pcure our pdon

alternative for the two half-lines why emn . . . by obedienc. Finally the reviser C has struck
out the whole of the passage and written a make-shift half-line tell me but this.

117 sounde'\ un only three minims. izi matie~\ the mark of contraction omitted.

Uorn\ z=Uamj a leash. 131 barbarous^ the second r an alteration apparently from a k.

140 mountanish^ un only three minims. 141 -ux] struck out with modern ink.

THE HARLEIAN ADDITION 37

moor Submyt yo" to theise noble gentlemen

entreate their mediation to the kinge 145

gyve vp yo' sealf to forme obay the maiestrate

and thers no doubt, but mercy may be found yf yc" so seek

These three pages, written in the ordinary English cursive
script of the Elizabethan period, are obviously the autograph
composition of the writer, and not a mere transcript by a copyist.
The nature of the first-hand corrections are sufficient proof of
this. It is also obvious that the writer was a careless contributor.
It has been remarked by Dr. Greg that he shows no respect for,
perhaps no knowledge of, the play on which he was at work.
In a haphazard fashion he distributes speeches and exclamations
among the insurgents, and sometimes he merely attaches the word
' other ' instead of the actual name of a character to a speech,
leaving it to the reviser to put things straight. In one passage,
which he has partially altered, he leaves two and a half lines
(11. 1 1 2- 1 4) so confused that the reviser has found no way out of
the difficulty but to strike them out and substitute a half-line of
his own. All these liberties would suggest that the writer was
one who held a high place among his fellow contributors to the
piecing-out of the play, and that they recognized his superior
talent just as much as later critics have done.

The first to suggest that this addition to the play of Sir
Thomas More was composed by, and was in the handwriting of,
Shakespeare was Mr. Richard Simpson, who contributed to Notes
and Queries [^ih Series, viii, July i, 1871) a note under the title
< Are there any extant MSS. in Shakespeare's handwriting > ' in

147 fot(nd'\ un only three minims.

3 8 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

which he claimed, as the dramatist's composition and autograph,
not only the addition (fF. 8, 9) to the Insurrection Scene, but
also additions to other scenes. With regard to the handwriting
his general statement is correct, that the style of the poet's hand,
as shown by his signatures, was that of the ordinary scrivener or
copyist of the time (that is, in the native English script). ' This
fact ', he continues, ' while it makes any holograph of his more
difficult to distinguish from similar writings, at the same time
points to the possibility or even probability of something from
his hand being extant among the mass of manuscripts written in
the scrivener's hand of the period.' From this dictum of the
difficulty of distinguishing among ordinary hands, as compared
with the handwritings of scholars, £qw will dissent; and, if
Shakespeare's hand can be once for all distinguished among
similar ordinary hands, we must all devoutly hope that other
autograph remains of his compositions may be speedily recog-
nized. But Mr. Simpson was not an expert in handwriting;
and he fell into the common error of seeing in the style of
writing of a period or school the style of an individual hand.

It will be convenient here to quote Mr. Simpson when he
reminds us that the Insurrection Scene represents the rioting of
the London apprentices against the aliens on the famous <ill
May day ' of i fi 7, and continues : ' The same feeling, prevalent
for years in Elizabeth's reign, was very nearly bursting out into
violent acts in September, lyS*^, when Recorder Fleetwood wrote
to Burghley that the apprentices had conspired an insurrection
against the French and Dutch, but especially the French, " all
things as like unto yll May day as could be devised, in all

THE HARLEIAN ADDITION 39

manner of circumstances, mutatis mutandis " ' j and concludes that
it was during the heat of this feeling that the play came before
the censor, who forthwith issued his order (written in the margin
of the first page of the MS.) 'to leave out the insurrection
wholly and the cause thereof.

The fact that this and other strictures of the censor were
ignored in the present MS. (otherwise the addition in which we
are interested would not have been written) has led Dr. Greg to
conclude that the play was already in its present shape when it
was submitted to the censor for approval, and that the censor's
notes are directions for further revision and do not refer to
revision already effected j and < that it was quite impossible to
comply with the demands of the censor without eviscerating the
play in a manner fatal to its success on the stage . . . The MS.
was consequently laid aside and the play never came on the
boards '.

Simpson's note seems to have attracted no particular atten-
tion, until, more than a year afterwards, Mr, James Spedding in
a communication to ISJotes and Queries (4th Series, x, Sept. 21,
1872) supported him in his ascription of the addition to the
Insurrection Scene (but not the other additions claimed), both as
regards composition and handwriting, to Shakespeare. Spedding
was more experienced and better qualified to hazard an opinion
on the handwriting, but, not being an expert, he confines his
remarks to recognition by general impression : that the writing
' is a hand which answers to all we know about Shakespeare's.
It agrees with his signature, which is a simple one, written in the
ordinary character of the time '. General impression is a very

40 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

valuable asset in identification, but it is not conclusive. We
recognize other persons usually by general impression ; but the
innumerable instances of mistaken identity afford sufficient proof
that something else is also needed. How many of us can describe
accurately, from memory, the subtle traits and variations in the
features of our friends ? . But it is these personal peculiarities
that, added to general impression, constitute the final convincing
proofs. So with handwriting. General impression will carry
the cautious expert an appreciable distance on his way, but he
will fortify his general impression by identifying the more
minute details, the personal peculiarities in the handwriting under
examination.

To return for a moment to Spedding's remarks on the hand-
writing attributed to Shakespeare. He states that < it agrees with
the tradition that his first occupation was that of a ^' Noverint "
or lawyer's copying clerk : for in that case he must have acquired
in early youth a hand of that type, which, when he left copying
and took to original composition, would naturally grow into
such a hand as we have here.' Whether the handwriting bears
within itself any indication of such training as a legal copyist
can only be considered after it has been subjected to analysis.

We will now turn to the examination of the three pages of
the addition to the play of Sir Thomas More which have been
attributed to Shakespeare, and in the first place we will take
a general survey of the style of writing.

The total number of written lines contained in the addition
is 147. In the first page (f. 8^) there are 45-; in the second
page (f. 8 h) there are yo j in the third page (f 9 a) there are 5-2.

VARIETY OF STYLE 41

Although the writing is generally small on the first page, there
are fewer written lines, as a good deal of space is occupied by
the dividing lines which separate the speeches of the several
characters. There is a decided distinction between the writing
of the first two pages and that of the third page. The text of
the former is evidently written with speed, and apparently with
a fine-pointed and hard pen. The rapid action of the hand is
indicated, for example, by the prevalence of thin long-shafted
descending letters [f and long /), which are carried down often
to unusual length and end in a sharp point, and by a certain
dash in the formation of the other letters both in the text and
in the marginal names of the characters. These signs of speed
generally slacken in the course of the second page, in the second
half of which the long-shafted descending letters give place to
some extent to a more deliberate and heavier style of lettering.
This change seems to be coincident with the change in the
character of the composition — the change from the noisy tumult
of the insurgents to the intervention of More with his persuasive
speeches, requiring more thought and choice of language on the
part of the author. The full effect of this change in the style
of the composition is manifest in the more deliberate character
of the writing of the third page. This page was probably
written later than the other two ; at least, not at the same sitting.
This seems to be indicated by the fact that, in order to finish
a speech at the foot of the second page, the author has arranged
its four concluding metrical lines in two written lines : which he
would hardly have troubled to do, if it had been his intention
to pass on immediately to a fresh page.

42 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

The writing of the third page, while it is pliant and runs in
a free style, maintains a more marked contrast between the light
and heavy strokes than is the case generally with the lettering
of the first two pages. "While the long-shafted descending letters
(y and long s) are there so common, here the larger proportion
of those letters are stoutly-shafted and even incline to be
truncated. Their different forms will be described more in
detail when we analyse the several letters of this hand. At the
moment it will be enough to state that in the first page the pro-
portion of the long descending/" to the shorter and more deliber-
ate form is about four to one j that of the long descending j- to
the shorter form, nearly three to one. In the second page the
proportions are reduced nearly to equality. In the third page
the balance inclines the other way, and the proportion of the
long / to the shorter form falls to about one to two ; and that
of the long j- to the shorter form to about one to three. We
may also for this purpose quote the proportions of the two
forms of the letter g as they appear in this hand — the more
simple form in which the stem is merely turned back and
finished off with a thickening or slight curl ; and the more
elaborate form in which the stem is turned back, but then
brought round again in a heavy curved stroke, like the blade of
a scythe. In the first and second pages the proportion of the
simple to the elaborate letter is a little over three to one ; in
the third page the proportion is reversed and the elaborate form
stands to the simpler as two to one. These figures may suffice to
demonstrate the varying influences of speed and of deliberation
on the handwriting of this author. But quite independently

VARIETY OF STYLE 43

of such literal calculations as a means of assisting palaeographical
judgement, for simple recognition of the distinction of the two
styles an appeal may be made to ocular experiment. If the
eyes, after resting on, say, the text of the first page long enough
to take in a general impression of the writing, are shifted suddenly
to the third page, and if the process is repeated twice or thrice,
the difference between the two styles is quickly appreciated.

If, then, there has been established a distinction of two
styles of writing, the speedyand the more deliberate, in these three
pages of the MS., an opinion may be offered that the more deli-
berate style would naturally be the one which would represent
the characteristic hand of the writer, being the style in which
he would set down his more thoughtful scenes more deliberately
than those of a lighter nature, such as the tumultuous passages in
the Insurrection Scene before the appearance of More which are
here presented. In the latter class of composition, he might be
expected to dash off his lines so easily as almost to be in the
position of a mere transcriber, and so to inscribe line after line
with little variety in the ordinary scrivener's clerical hand, such
as that which generally fills the first two pages. The more
deliberate hand of the third page would postulate temporary
pauses in the course of composition and corresponding suspen-
sions of the pen and consequent loss in the momentum of the
writing. Hence we should expect to find in this style of writing
greater opportunities for detecting the personal peculiarities of
the writer in his formation of individual letters and acces-
sories of the script, than in the even cursive flow of the more
clerical hand.

44 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

One of the accessories of this handwriting is the frequently
occurring introductory upstroke which is attached as a calli-
graphic ornament to certain letters when any of them stands at
the beginning of a word, and which there has been occasion to
notice on a former page (p. 28). These letters are /, m^ «, r, v^ w.
But this writer is somewhat capricious in his employment of the
upstroke, for he often neglects to attach it to those letters when
in an initial position. At the same time a glance along the lines
will satisfy the eye that its use here, though not universal, is
general. Its construction is as follows: the writer either forms
the stroke by a single action of the pen, or more usually he
first makes a short downstroke well below the line of writing,
then, without lifting the pen, he forms the upstroke, either
travelling over the course of the preliminary downstroke, and
thus imparting to the first part of the upstroke a certain thicken-
ing, or, if the downstroke happens to lie out of the direct line,
leaving it to the right or left, and thus forming a hook at the
extreme lower point or more rarely a loop. Instances of all
these actions will be found without much trouble in any one of
the three plates, but may most conveniently be looked for in
the uninjured third page. For example, the hooked stroke
appears in the words < vnreuerent ' (1. 11 o], < mountanish inhu-
manity ' (1. 140), ' weele ' (1. 142) ; the loop, in ' needes ' (1. 130).
But it is not only the frequency of these otiose upstrokes that
arrests the eye, but more especially their length. Few of them
are short , the greater number are long enough to extend to the
next following line of writing j some are of more inordinate
length, such as those in 'my masters' (1. 29), « weele ' (1. 31),

THE LETTERS OF THE ADDITION 45

'whiles' (1. 39), <rule' (1. ^6), < marry' and < removing' (1. 70),
'wretched' (1. 74), 'ruffians' (1. 84), 'marry' (I. 95), 'rout'
(1. ii<^), ' well '(1. 117), 'moorne' (1. 123), 'must needes ' (1. 1 30),
' ruld ' and ' master moor ' (1. 142), and in the name ' Moor '
among the characters in the margin of the second and third pages.

We will now proceed to an analysis of the letters in the
addition to the play of Sir Thomas More^ and first of the small
letters, the alphabet of which is complete with the exception of
the letter x j the analysis of such capital letters as occur therein
will follow.

a. — There are two forms of this letter : the normal closed form ;
and the form open at the top like ?/, which has attached
to it an overhead curve that is a means of linking with
the preceding letter, such as /;, m^ n^ /, y. In this hand also,
as in Shakespeare's signature No. i (see p. 20), is to be
noticed the occurrence, in the second form, of a spur at
the back of the letter, resulting from the overhead curve
being produced quite down to the base line of writing :
instances are to be seen in ' audience ' (1. 47), ' at ' (1. 75),
'and' (11. 75, 85), 'what' (1. 80), 'ar' (1. 97), 'are' (1. 107),
' harber ' (1. 127),' nation ' (1. 131), and in other places.

b. — In the normal letter of the English hand, the stem is carried
down to the base line and terminates in a point whence the
curve proceeds. Here the normal pattern is fairly well
followed \ but occasionally the base is round.

c. — The simple normal shape is scarcely varied. The vertical
stroke is occasionally a little more curved than usual. It is

4<J SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

noticeable that the writer makes use of the capital letter
very often in the early part of the text j less frequently as
he progresses.

d. — TJiis letter is the ordinary looped form. It varies in size,
sometimes being reduced to the dimensions of an e. When
following a tall letter, the loop is elongated and thrown
back as in <Wisdome' (11. 35-, 37), Wsd ' (1. 139), 'hold'
(11. 2 (J, f3)j <coold' (1. 6\\ 'woold' (11. 64, 125-), «shoold'
(11. 81, 124, 127), &c.

e. — The ordinary form used by the writet is the letter with
reversed loop. As a final letter he sometimes finishes it off
with a flourish ending in a dot. He also uses rarely the
more set type, composed of two curves, not looped as in
« grote ' (1. 2), * meerly "* (1. 8), ' peace ' (1. ;-o), &c.
f. — There are two forms of this letter : the long-shafted form,
that isy the shaft descending well below the line and termi-
nating in a point ; and the stout-shafted form. The first
prevails in the earlier portion of the text, in which the
writing has been more speedy^ the second, in the later
portion, where the writing is more deliberate. The shaft
of the long letter is made in one stroke, and the curved
head is added to the top and carried round to accomplish
the cross-bar. In the shorter form^ the shaft, more or less
heavily drawn, descends from the line of writing generally
to a moderate length, then the pen ascends without being
lifted, travelling usually over the course of the shaft, and
the curved head and cross-bar are added. In the double
letter (which from an early date has done duty for the

THE LETTERS OF THE ADDITION 47

capital letter) the head of the first limb is drawn down to
form the shaft of the second limb, to which the curved head
is then added and the two limbs are crossed in one stroke
(see ' ffraimc ', 1. 1 27). Final y has no cross-bar, but the head
is drawn down and in normal hands is thickened at the
extremity j in this hand it is finished off with a flourish
resembling the letter ^.

g. — This letter has two forms. In the first, the stem produced
below the line is turned back and is finished off with a
thickening or small curl. In the second, the stem is turned
back in the same manner but is then brought round again
in a broad curved stroke resembling an inverted scythe
blade.

/i. — The pendent bow of this straggling letter usually hangs
loosely in this hand j less frequently the letter is braced
up, the bow starting from the main stroke with a sudden
curve, and it then takes the form almost of a modern 6
('wash', 1. 108).

z. — An unobtrusive letter, with a tendency to be pointed at
the base.

/^. — A letter of various forms: (i) the normal letter, having
a looped stem with a short base-stroke at right angles and
a loop and cross-bar attached to the centre of the stem ; —
(2) the stem curved at the top and brought round at the
base like /, the pen then travelling upwards and forming
a small loop, and thence making the cross-bar, e.g. ' king '
(1. 122), 'knyves' (1. 134); — (3) the same /-formation, but
instead of making the small loop the pen turns to the left

48 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

and accomplishes the cross-bar by a horizontal stroke to the
left and then to the right, above which a heavy comma is
added to represent the small loop — an unusual form —
' knees ' (1. 1 1 o) ; — (4) the same /-formation, but the end of
the curve looped or thickened, and there is no cross bar.
This form is used especially in words ending in ke-^ the e
negligently written and ending in a flourish — < shake ' (1. 1 4),
«lyke'(ll. 85, 109, 122, 13;).

/. Not a well-formed letter, the back tending to be bowed.

When doubled, the pair of letters is usually written
small.

fn. — This letter is never very well formed, the writer showing
. some impatience with it, running it small, and, when it is
doubled or comes next to n or u^ not always forming the
right number of minims. Early in a word the correct
convexity of the minims is usually maintained ^ otherwise
there is a tendency to concave formation (see ' mountanish
inhumanity', 1. 140). In final m the last stroke is more
generally straight, without being turned up.

n. — What has been said about m applies generally to n. There
is much tendency to concavity when it is combined with u
or doubled, as in such words as < country' and 'cannot'.
Final // has generally this defect, except in monosyllabic
words. There is one instance of the last stroke of final n
being turned up and back over the line — ' infeccion ' (1. 14).

0, — This letter is more independent in its formation and is less
liable to combination than other letters. It generally escapes
linking with a following letter, except in the common words

THE LETTERS OF THE ADDITION 49

< yo-* ' and * yo"^ ', where it changes its normal circle into a
looser formation.

p. — This letter has many forms, the circular head shaped in the
more perfect manner of the scrivener's letter, as in * peace '
(end of 1. j-o), * desperat ' (1. 107), or merely written in a loop ;
and the stem ranging from a short stump to a long descending
stroke. Instances of the stumpy letter are to be found in
'passe' (1. 4), 'prentisses' (1. 23), 'peace' (11. yo, 5-3, no),
'patterne' (I. 82), 'power' (1. f)f)\ 'possesse' (1. 120); of the
medium length of stem we have such examples as ' poor '
(11. (^8, 71, 7f), 'plodding' (1. 76\ 'prevayle' (1. 81); of the
long stem, with return linking stroke, ' prentizes ' (1, 9),
'prentisses' (1. 22), 'peace' (1. 109), 'portigall' (1. 128); of
the long descending stem terminating in a point, ' peace '
(1. do), and in the ^-symbol for pro (II. 114, 117, 128, 143).
In the ^-symbol for par or per (11. 9, 14, 15-, 92, 143) the
stem is rather sloped and turned round in a sweeping loop.

q, — Like the modern letter j the stem pointed at the extremity

(11. 21, 78, 119).

;'. — The double-stemmed English letter is commonly used j more
seldom the left-shouldered form ^^ as in ' great ' (1. 1 24), and
in the common abbreviated word ' yc" '.

s. — The long s (f ) employed at the beginning or in the middle
of a word, both in single and double form, follows in con-
struction that of f^ of course omitting the cross-bar. In
the earlier portion of the text, where the writing is more
cursive, instances occur in which the writer in his haste has
detached the curved head from the shaft and thrown it

i»ii

5-0 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

forward ('question', 1. 21, ' sealues ', 1. ^6). The double
letter is seen in 1. 120. The small looped form used as final j-
is often finished off in a flourish.

It is remarkable that the writer has in two instances
employed the Italian form of cursive long j- (/) in correcting
the text : in altering ' only ' into ' souly ' (1. 102), and ' warre '
into * warrs ' (1. 113). He also uses an enlarged form of the
same Italian letter, but looping it at the base, as the initial
letter for the < seriant ' (Sergeant-at-arms), the character
entered in the margin of 1. 1 7. A few lines below he uses
the English long s for the same character.

/. — The writer makes use of two forms of t: the more con-
ventional neatly written scrivener's letter, curved at the top
and having a short base-stroke ; and a rougher and heavier
character, generally with a straight stem and a horizontal
finishing stroke to represent the cross-bar.

//. — This letter calls for no particular remark. Like m and «,
it is often written negligently small. With regard to the
word ' you ', it was the practice to write the u above the
line, as if the word were abbreviated. The writer follows
the practice, but now and then he writes the letter in the
line (11. 13, 107, 127).

V. — Normally formed, with little, if any, variation. In the early
portion of the text, where the writing is more cursive, there
are tokens of haste in the sweeping initial curve of the letter,
as in M^idoing' (1. 8), ' vppon ' (1. 19).

w. — This letter is also fairly constant to the normal form ;
but, like Vy under stress of haste it developes occasionally

THE LETTERS OF THE ADDITION yi

a sweeping initial curve, as in < wisdome ' (1. 37), 'weele'
(1. 38), and in other words (11. 5-3, 5-9).

X. — There is no instance of this letter. The norma:l letter at
this period resembles p in the formation of the head, but
the descending stroke curves sharply to the right.

y, — The conventional form is employed, with little variation.
The descending bow, like that of /;, is occasionally carried
up above the line to link with the following letter.

z. — Only one instance, of the normal form, occurs — in 'prentizes'

(1- 9)-

Oi capital letters the following are found in these three pages
of the play : J^ 5, T, Z), ^, ^ (doing duty as a capital), /or y, Z,
P, ^5", T, W^ T. Some of them are more or less arbitrarily varied
from the normal models. At all times there has been a natural
tendency to introduce fanciful variations among the capitals
which, in comparison with the small letters, are not so frequently
called for and hence rather invite capricious treatment.

A. — A straggling letter, devoid of cross-bar, the incipient curve
enclosing an ornamental dot (1. 43) or not thus ornamented

B. — The English capital is rather elaborate, preceded by a flying
fore-limb. It appears in 11. 3, 37, 43, yp, and in the margin
of the second page.

C. — This letter, formed somewhat like a modern cursive capital 0
with a horizontal cross-bar, is frequent in the earlier portion
of the text [e.g. 11. ir, 14, 27, 28, ji, 5-2, 5-4), rarer towards
the end(^.^. 11. i2<5, 138).

£ 2

J 2 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

D. — The conventional letter appears in 1. 13. What appears
to be an arbitrary form, a straggUng enlargement of the
minuscule, is seen in the name * Doll ' in the margins.

E, — The conventional crescent-shaped letter with central double
cross-bar (11. 24, 30).

F. — The double/ represents the capital in 'ifraunc' (1. 127).

/. or y. — The conventional letter, beginning with a looped head,
a cross-bar in the middle, and a pendent curve below the
line, is seen in 11. 28, 35-, j- 8, 89. An arbitrary form, looped
at top and bottom and descending below the line, occurs in
11. 73, 80, 99, 128, 129. A nondescript letter, intermediate
between the above forms, stands at the beginning of 1. 5-8.

L. — The conventional letter is generally at this period written
in a sloping posture : we may call it a reclining letter. The
writer here follows the convention both in the text (11. 42,
5-5, 90) and in the margins of the first and second pages.

P The normal letter of the scrivener's alphabet, with an orna-
mental dot enclosed in the final curve is seen in 1. i. Another
variety, also with central ornamental dot, occurs at the
beginning of 1. 35-.

iS". — The English capital of the conventional type, the construc-
tion of which has engaged attention above, p. 13, is frequent
in the lower half of the first page, both in text and margin ;
and in 1. 1 44. It is symmetrically formed in the name < Surrey '
(1. 24). In the marginal entries it is written at great speed.

T. — This letter occurs twice (11. 30, 5-5-): a crescent delicately
formed, with a heavier oblique cross-stroke towards the
upper extremity of the crescent, within which is an

IDENTIFICATION H

ornamental dot. This is a refinement of the conventional
letter.

W. — A capital letter with a sweeping initial curve balanced by
a final curve which is attached to the body of the letter by
a short base-curve (like the ordinary cursive German capital)
and encloses an ornamental dot — in ' Wisdome' (1. 3f).

T. — Formed on the lines of the minuscule letter, with a sweeping
initial curve (1 fi).

Having now analysed the handwriting of this addition
to the play of Sir Thomas More^ we are at length in a posi-
tion to consider whether the signatures of Shakespeare, which
have been the subject of the first part of this study, and
the three pages of this addition have been made to yield
sufficient internal evidence to prove that the documents are
in the handwriting of one and the same person. The problem
is not an ordinary one ; it is not a simple matter of deciding
whether a particular MS. is in a handwriting already ascer-
tained, of which abundant specimens are extant as material for
comparison. Here we have to establish the identity of the
handwriting of these three pages of the Harleian MS. with
another handwriting altogether unknown to us but for the
survival of a few signatures, half of which are imperfect. The
task may be compared to that of attempting to identify a face
in the dark by the dim light of a lucifer match. But, notwith-
standing the difficulties, we venture to think that sufficient close
resemblances have been detected to bring the two handwritings
together and to identify them as coming from one and the same

^4 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

hand. Personally we feel confident that in this addition to the
play of Sir Thomas More we have indeed the handwriting of
William Shakespeare.

The discerning reader will doubtless have been quick to take
the points of resemblance which have been brought out in the
analyses, and will have been prepared for this opinion. We will
presently recapitulate these points ; but, before proceeding to do
so, we may briefly survey the new position and see how far this
identification satisfies our preconceived notions of what might
prove to be the style of Shakespeare's handwriting. The character
of the writing of the signatures made us confident that any
remains of his compositions which might come to light would
prove to be written in the native English script ; and the history
of his broken education seemed to justify us in anticipating that
it would be of an ordinary type, without individual character
marking it to any great extent : a strong and fluent hand without
calligraphic pretensions, partly self-taught and trained by the
manual practice of authorship into an instrument sufficiently
facile to enable him to express his thoughts easily with his pen.
How far, then, does the handwriting of the More MS. satisfy
these expectations? The difference between the style of the
first two pages and that of the third page has been already
described : in the former we have found evidence of speed j in
the latter, evidence of deliberation. We may, then, answer our
question by replying that in the style of the writing of the third
page we have a reasonable fulfilment of such anticipated condi-
tions. The hand is the native English hand with nothing
particularly characteristic in it to distinguish it; sufficiently

IDENTIFICATION ;f

strong and clear for practical usefulness, but rather rough and
irregular. But, turning to the first two pages, we are conscious
of another influence. While the hand is the same as in the
third page, the effect of speed has been to induce more general
regularity and uniformity and to convey the impression that
Shakespeare had received a more thorough training as a scribe
than had been thought probable. In this particular the hand-
writing exceeds our expectations. To put the case briefly : in
the writing of the first two pages there is more of the hand of
the scrivener ; in the writing of the third page there is more of
the hand of the author. We have already tentatively suggested
that the writing of the first two pages (or at least most of it) may
reflect ease of composition, while the deliberate hand of the third
page may indicate more deliberate thought. If rare good fortune
should ever lay before our eyes the autograph MSS. of Shake-
speare's plays, we should expect to find, for example, the second
style in Hamlet^ the first in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

We have, then, to revert to the question of Shakespeare's
education in handwriting, and this takes us back to the tradi-
tion, to which Spedding refers, that in his youth he found
employment as a lawyer's copying clerk — a ^Noverint', in
the slang phrase. This so-called tradition, however, proves on
examination to be no tradition at all^ the idea appears to
have originated in a suggestion by Malone,' by way of ex-
plaining the prevalence of legal terms and phrases in Shake-
speare's plays, that before he left Stratford he may hav^e served
as a clerk to some attorney practising in the local Court of

' In his essay on the chronological order of Shakespeare's plays.

S6 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

Record. The phantom tradition may be therefore put aside
without more ado. But still the fact remains that the style
of writing of the first two pages of the addition certainly does
convey the impression of training, at least in some degree, in
the formal style of the scrivener ; and this impression is en-
forced by the employment of certain formal contractions and
abbreviations of words which were in common use among
lawyers and trained secretaries of the day. Added to all this,
the prevalence of the fine initial upstrokes in the writing, which
suggest a tendency to formality and ornamental calligraphy,
must also be taken into account. But of course it is not
necessary to try to explain the existence of such formality of
script as due to any direct legal or secretarial training. Shake-
speare may very probably have acquired the formal cast of
writing, which for convenience we may call his scrivener style,
by constant practice in such work as transcription from
scriveners' copies of plays and actors' parts, on which it is not
unreasonable to conjecture that he may have been employed
in his early connexion with theatrical life ; and a little later
in his prentice work as a playwright and adapter and botcher
of the compositions of others. This, however, is only unprofit-
able guessing: we may content ourselves with recording the
existence of this more formal scrivener variety in the hand-
writing which we maintain to be Shakespeare's.

There is little room for doubt that the names of the
characters of the play were written in the margins of the pages
after the text had been composed. The perfunctory manner
in which they are scribbled and the abbreviation of many

IDENTIFICATION 5-7

of them, increasing in brevity as they proceed, seem to prove
this. On the first page 'Lincolne' diminishes successively to
< Linco ', ' Line ', < Lin '. ' Other ', meaning any one whose name
the reviser may choose to insert, runs down to < oth ' and at
last dwindles to solitary ' o '. Even in the case of the leading
character, More, although he gets his full name ^ Moor ' in
most instances, yet it is omitted altogether from the speech
at the end of the second page and has to be supplied by the
reviser. And what can be more ludicrous than the reduction
of the name to bovine * Moo ', attached to the long speech on
the third page, for lack of a scratch of the pen to add the
harmless necessary r? In the face of these indications of care-
lessness, we might almost say boredom, on the part of Shake-
speare in the matter of vain repetitions, we begin to experience
an abatement in our wonder that he shirked signing his name
in full if he could invent any excuse for cutting it short.

It is time to compare the alphabetical letters which are
found both in the signatures and in the addition to the More
MS. : for convenience the signatures may be classed and re-
ferred to as S, the addition as A.' These letters are the eleven
small letters ^, ^, h^ /', ^, /, w, />, r, /, y^ and the three capital
letters 5, 5, W ; but of four of these, viz. /', /, r, y^ there are not
sufficient instances in S as well as in A to afford criteria.

a. — In both S and A the two forms (the closed and the open)
are used. The open letter appears both in Si and in S2

' The two alphabets have been separately analysed above, pp. 20-2 j, and pp.

5-8 SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

linked with the preceding h. In A it is a common form,
provided with a linking curve as explained in the analysis
of the letters of S (p .20). The letter in S i is remark-
able in having a spur at the back, caused by the curved
link above the line being drawn down and back along the
base line. The same spur-construction is found in many
instances in A. As this is a strongly marked peculiarity,
its occurrence in both S and A is very significant and points
to identity.

e. — The letter with the reversed loop appears in S 2 and is
the ordinary letter in A. The more formal set letter, com-
posed of two independent curves, not looped, is occasionally
used in A ; it also occurs in S 3.

k. — ^The normal English cursive letter is constant in A. It appears
in ordinary form in S i and S 2 . The method of linking the
letter above the line with the following letter creates
a feature of resemblance. The set form of the letter in S 3
does not occur in A : it would not be expected in a cursively
written MS.

k. — Four varieties of this letter have been described as found
in A (p. 47). Three of them are represented in S : the
normal letter appears in S 2 and S 3 ; the unusual form
marked (3) in the analysis of the letters of A appears in
S 5- J and in S d a letter devoid of a cross-bar as in (4)
of A. Making due allowance for the different conditions
under which A and S were written, and therefore without
pretending to detect exact likenesses between the two series
of letters, the coincidence of three varieties, constructed

IDENTIFICATION S9

in the same manner, being found in both series, provides
a forcible argument for identity of handwriting ; and special
stress should be laid on the existence in both S and A of
a form (3) which is of unusual construction and may be
considered a personal peculiarity of Shakespeare's hand (see
k in S ^ and in ' knees ', A, 1. 11 o).

m. — In S 2 is to be seen the same inclination as in A of this
letter to diminish in scale and for the minims to become
concave. In this instance the end of the letter is curved and
turned back over the line — the only example in S. In A
there is no example of this form of termination of the
letter; but in the case of ^z, a letter of similar construction,
there is a single example in < infeccion ' (1. 14).

p. — Of the varieties of this letter found in A, the short-stemmed
letter appears in S 3 ; the letter with medium stem in S 2.
The long reclining letter in S i with sweeping stroke through
the stem (the symbol for par or per) may be compared, for
posture and construction, with the symbol in 'pardon', A,

1- 143-
s. — In S 2, 3, (5 Shakespeare has adopted the Italian long cursive

letter (/); in S y the English long /(f) is used. In A the

Italian letter is employed in two alterations in the text (11.

102, 113) and, with a slight modification, in the name of one

of the characters (1. 17). This is the only letter of the foreign

script to be found either in S or A ; and its presence in both

of them has the strongest significance for their identity.

B. — Among the signatures, this letter (only found once, in S 6)

is of the scrivener type. In construction it is similar to

the letter employed in A (11. 3, 37, 43, f 9).

6o SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

S. — Of this English capital letter the most symmetrical example
in S is in the first signature j and it may be compared with
the S of < Surrey ' in A, 1. 24. The rather cramped example
in S 2 may be compared with that in <Seriant', A, 1. 43,
which is a little constrained, being near the foot of the page
where the writing runs small.

IF. — The only instance in A of this capital letter is that in 1. 3 5*.
It is constructed on the same lines as the letter in S 2, S 4, and
S f, but is written more symmetrically.

The analytical remarks on the rest of the letters in A,
which have not been included in this comparison, may serve to
aid in the identification of any other MSS. which may come
to light and may be put forward as autographs of the great
dramatist.

Besides the points of resemblance between the individual
letters of S and A, the important feature, common to both, of
the use of the fine upstroke as an ornamental adjunct to certain
letters must also be insisted on. It is indeed, in its way, as strong
a mark of identity as any that has been adduced. Its frequency
in A is evidence of its being a habit of the hand. Its unexpected
presence among the signatures of Shakespeare may be regarded
as a happy occurrence • and, in order to bring more clearly into
view the most probable reason for its appearance in connexion
with the main signature, No. 5, to Shakespeare's will, a few
words may be added. When, as suggested above, the dying
man braced his nerves to execute that document, he naturally
must have been impressed with the solemnity of the occasion.

IDENTIFICATION 6i

He was about to inscribe perhaps the most important signature
of his life. He was prepared to do so ' in a high style '. He
therefore introduced it with the formal words 'By me'.
Involuntarily perhaps, but quite evidently, his hand assumed
formality. He began with a scrivener's formal capital B —
a rather troublesome letter for a sick man to accomplish :
a simple minuscule letter, easier to write, would have served the
purpose equally well. Thus he succeeded with ' By '. The
next letter he had to write was the ?n of < me '. Still having
formality in his mind, he naturally introduced the long orna-
mental upstroke which, as is amply demonstrated in the text
of the addition to the More MS., so frequently accompanies
that letter. And so, writing 'me', he passed on to his Christian
name ; and still under the influence of formality, and now
departing from his usual practice of subscribing his signature
without preliminary flourish, he began the TF with another still
longer upstroke, managing with dexterity the initial needle-eyed
loop, and thus accomplished the Christian name. So far he
had succeeded in the formal scrivener style — and then came the
breakdown. This we believe to be the history of the formal
treatment of this signature, and of the employment in this
place of the ornamental upstroke.

It is necessary to remark on the phonetic spelling (if it can
be justly called phonetic) of some of the words in the text of
the addition. For it may have come as a shock to some that
the alteration, in line 1 02, of ' only ' to ' souly ' (= solely) should
have been adopted as a correct interpretation. There can be
no question of the insertion, before the word ' only ', of an

6z SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING

Italian long /, the same letter as that interlined to alter
' warre ' into * warrs ' (1. 1 1 3). The only apparent violence done
is by the assumption that the n of * only ' is to be read as the
u of ' souly ' — an assumption that implies that Shakespeare was
conscious of the careless formation of his w's and u% and was
prepared to read them with interchangeable values. But we see
no improbability in this implication.

The only remaining question which calls for remark is the
probable date of the play of Sir Thomas More and its additions.
If, as we believe, the addition which has been here a subject
of our study is the composition, and in the handwriting, of
Shakespeare, it must be placed in the earlier period of his career
as a dramatist, when he was employed in such work as adapting
and supplementing the plays of other authors. Mr. Simpson's
suggested date of is%6 or 15-87 appears to be too early.
Dr. Greg in his edition for the Malone Society has suggested
'some such year as 15-92 or 15-93 ', which would fit in well with
the chronology of Shakespeare's career.' The few watermarks
which are still visible in the Harleian MS. containing the play
do not help us. They are varieties of the tankard mark,
perhaps the most common of all the numerous watermarks of
the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and of such
countless and rapidly changing patterns that the chance of
identification by means of examples to be sought in dated MSS.
would be infinitesimal.

' Dr. Greg's more recent opinion, however, inclines to brine down the date to the
end of the century, which he thinks would be fatal to the attribution of the addition to
Shakespeare. See The Modern Language I{eview, vol. viii (19 1 3), 89.

IDENTIFICATION 67,

Finally we venture to submit that, despite the scanty examples
of Shakespeare's hitherto acknowledged handwriting, the cumu-
lative evidence in favour of the identity of the writing of the
signatures with that of the addition to the play of Sir Thomas
More^ which has been elicited by the scrutiny of the documents,
is far more conclusive than might have been anticipated. We
commend it to the careful consideration of the impartial
reader. There should be no mystery about the study of
handwriting. He who undertakes to explain to others the
identity of this hand with that hand has a simple and straight-
forward task to perform. By his own wider experience he may
be qualified, not to force his opinion upon them, but to guide
them how to look at things in a way which he has found by
study to be the right way to reveal to untrained eyes points of
evidence in the documents under examination, which without
such guidance might escape them. When he has done this his
task is accomplished, and he leaves it to them to decide whether
his conclusions are just.

PRINTED IN ENGLAND
AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Date Due

IViAR i u 19

'^ /

MR 16 19

i:. n

i

Library Bureau

Cat. No. 1137

^UCSOUTHERiREGlONALUB^^^^^

LIBRARY
•WWRSITY Of cm

TIMES LITERARY |]^gg^p

THURSDAY, MARCH I,

THE HANDWKITING OF
SHAKESPEARE.

Shakespeare's Handwriting. A Study by
Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, G.C.B.
(Oxford : Clarendon Press. 10s. 6d. net.)

Sir Thomas More (together with The Two
Noble Kinsmen and Edward III.) is one of
those fifteen plays or so to which the collective,
and perhaps too complimentary, title of
Shakespeare's Apocrypha has been given. It
seems to have a better claim to Shakespearian
quality than the majority of them, but its chief
title to fame may be held to reside in the fact
that part of it is claimed to have been written
in Shakespeare's own handwriting.

Few Elizabethan plays of such calibre as
Sir Thomas More exist in manuscript at all ;
but this particular drama existed in no other
form until it was discovered among the Plar-
leian manuscripts at the British Museum, and
edited for the first time by Alexander Dyce in
1844, ■when it was printed for the Shakespeare
Society ; since then it has had the distinction
of being thrice edited. The manuscript was
written in at least four different hands, and one
of these handwritings — embodying two or
three hundred of the finest lines in the play —
was seriously asserted by two such authori-
tative scholars of the period as Simpson and
Spedding to be Shakespeare's own. Sir Thomas
More, Sherriff, manhandles an insurgent mob
in a speech of a singular cogency and humour ;
that this speech, and one or two other
fragments, came directly from the pen and
brain of Shakespeare \vas claimed by Richard
Simpson in 1871, and supported by James
Spedding in 1872, ^ith slight differences of
detail. Mr. Hopkinson, the next editor,
accepted these general conclusions; but most
subsequent investigators, such as Sir A. Ward,
Dr. FurnivaU, Mr. Fleay, Mr. Tucker Brooke,
and Mr. Greg, have preferred to take up a
rather ambiguous, sceptical, or at least in-
credulous attitude.

It seems to be generally admitted that the

writer of the three pages contributed to the
second act of Sir Thomas More.

These pages are all in facsimile in collotype
in the present nionograpK, Sir Edward is
a conjurer with the forms of letters as per-
suasive as he is modest ; and a microscopic
study of the similarities between signatures
and the script reduces the sceptic to a feeling
of acute discomfort. But there are other micro-
scopists at work, and the literary expert on
whom Sir Edward seems principally to rely
has most unhappily and inconsiderately trans-
ferred his central date for the play in its
present shape from 1592 to 1600. Other
experts, it is true, have assigned 1586 or 1595
as the probable date of the addition atti'ibuted
to Shakespeare; any date before 1595 would
correspond well enough with the rather
conjectural chronology of Shakespeare's
career. Between 1588 and 1594 he may well
have been employed in adapting and supple-
menting the plays of other authors; the cava-
lier way in Mhich he ignores his context seems
to suggest that his position was one of autho-
rity and privilege among his collaborators.
The work itself seems to suggest certain
affinities with the Jack Cade scenes in
Henry VI. ; and also with other scenes in
which history is motived by rhetoric down to
Julius Ccpsar and Coriolanus. But the con-
tribution of such a passage by Shakespeare
to such an archaic play at such a late date
as 1600 hardly seems compatible with Shake-
speare's known activities at this period, and
the date is deemed by the play's latest editor
to be fatal to the attribvition of the addition
to Shakespeare.

These play chronologers, it may be urged,
are apt to be a little changeable ; and if opinion
swings back to 1593 the balance of probability
should not be unfavourable to Sir Edward's
hypothesis. One would like to see a verdict
on such work as his pronounced in the affirma-
tive. One factor of the problem remains to be
stated. It is that the expert disclaims the
idea of a mere transcription. The identity of
author and writer is held to be proved by the
corrections. These make the manuscript a
unique illustration of the author's method of
composition during his early maturity (sup-
posing author and Shakespeare one). The fre-